Hunter's Game by Mike Wild

Author:Mike Wild [Wild, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2018-12-02T18:30:00+00:00

XII

Between A Roc And A Hard Place

Lightning lit the night and thunder boomed as Elly Dean approached the Aerie of the Roc-Riders. It was that kind of place.

She was still some way distant as she stared along the rain-splattered cobbles that wound up to the castle on the cliff side. It was your usual dark and imposing fortress type, though unique in one aspect – fully a third of the structure projecting off a cliff seemed to hang in mid-air. The Roc-Riders seemed to be as much masters of construction as they were masters of the air.

There was purpose to the gravity-defying section of the structure. It was a series of eight towers and accompanying platforms, obviously the landing pads and ‘nests’ for the rocs themselves, and as Elly stared at them outlined against the sky, one roc departed with a great flap of wings, while another arrived home from some unknown mission, coming in to land in a smooth and graceful, talons-extended glide.

Elly’s yantii, sensing the presence of the great beasts, whinnied beneath her, and she patted its neck soothingly. She’d come by land rather than dragonfly for the very reason her animal was unnerved – there was no telling how the rocs – or, indeed, their riders – would react to intrusion in their airspace.

Thus, she guided the yantii up the long and winding approach, as the rain pounded down. As she drew closer to the aerie’s entrance, a roc-rider swooped over her head, close enough for her to feel the downdraft from the slow flap of the beast’s wings, and as it circled she looked up to see the face of its rider checking her out. After half a minute or so the roc-rider departed, swooping up in the direction of the aerie, to which it took Elly another twenty minutes to arrive.

The brightness and warmth of torches in sconces was strangely welcoming, even if the firmly closed portcullis they lit was not. There was no sign of a guard, nor even, now, the roc-rider who’d given her the once over. The courtyard beyond was empty. The only sound of life a dull sound of carousing coming from one of the inner buildings.

“Hello?” Elly shouted. She looked for some kind of bell-pull or gong or other Yillarnyan device to announce her arrival, but found none. It would have been redundant anyway – they already knew she was here. “Hello!” she shouted again.

Nothing.

Well, this was bloody annoying.

Elly dismounted and examined the portcullis to see if there was any way she could force it open. It was rusted through. May as well have been a wall. She guessed the roc-riders didn’t get many visitors, so didn’t have much need for a normal way in. Okay, then, she’d have to find another entrance. She scouted the wall – to the left it ended in inpenetrable forest which literally stopped her dead in her tracks, no room even for a probing hand; and to the right at the lower reaches of the cliff edge, far less forbidding than what lay higher but nonetheless impassable.

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